Radio review

The People's Plinth (Radio 4) took a while to get to its question: "What's public art for?" But it meandered entertainingly, beginning with some very ripe Devon accents reading letters of protest about some controversial standing stones installed on a roundabout in Barnstaple. "Have I gone crazy," wrote one enraged local, "or has Devon County Council lost its marbles?" This was one of the milder comments.

Presenter Jolyon Jenkins then spoke to a Conservative councillor opposed to the stones, and made the grave error of comparing the work to Stonehenge. The councillor sounded beyond apoplectic. "I must," he seethed, "contest your interpretation." He then suggested, as if reaching for the worst insult, that the stones point "haphazardly". Jenkins countered that they do, in fact, point to the winter solstice. The councillor muttered that they "happen" to point that way. It was a brilliantly brittle, silly spat.

Artists in public-art schemes spoke tellingly about the pressure their work is put under. Michael Pinsky made work for the Knowle West estate in Bristol, appreciating only afterwards the extent of deprivation there. "It's too much of a gap," he said flatly, "to change a community like that with one or two pieces of art."